A long time ago, something broke inside him. Or maybe that part never worked to begin with, and he was born with the defect. However it happened, he's aware of the cogs that are slightly off-kilter, vividly conscious of the way they grate in the machinery. But he keeps that awareness neatly stored away in the dark recesses of some internal closet, where anything else that upsets the turning of the gears is thrown and locked away.
This is the way he learned to deal with difficulties life threw at him, and he could hardly see any other way to function; that's how he'd been raised, and putting himself aside in order to take care of more important things comes as naturally as breathing now.
Sometimes, he knows – and beats himself up over it – that he leaves the door ajar after throwing something new in. Sometimes he's forced to face down something he's left to wither away in the dark but has instead festered into something worse than it had been before. And he can't stand himself when that happens, can't stand how weak it makes him feel, how pathetic when he needs help. He isn't the one who's supposed to need saving; his job is Protector.
So it perplexes when he meets someone whose job is to protect him, someone who invests everything in his interests, who will drop everything to listen if listening is what he needs, who tries so hard to understand, even if they can't. It's a slow process, this friendship. He's not used to trusting people and they aren't used to needing to earn trust; they clash, but it's harmless and mostly a mess of confusion on both sides, and it subsides as soon as he realizes that they are only trying to help, as soon as they prove themselves different, better than their compatriots.
Few people find themselves capable of prying open the cellar door: his father, sometimes his brother, occasionally his adoptive uncle – family. Family means everything to him, because it's all he's ever had to hold onto – and his life depends on holding onto this. Family keeps him breathing, keeps him walking tall with a purpose.
Somehow, this feels different. This isn't family, this friendship, can't be, it's too strange. The thought startles him, which he loathes, so the issue at hand, the character of this connection, gets thrown off into the cellar with everything else he can't bear to think about. Then one day, they knock on the door, and it opens, and the question demands to be asked, has grown monstrous in its exile.
What is this?
Fine, he decides. Family. It's like family. And he throws the word in the question's face, slams the door shut, stands breathing hard against it, because he's rattled by the need for such a question. He knows with a quiet sort of despair that he's given himself a lie – this still isn't quite family, though the same concern, the same high expectation of character is still there.
For a while, it doesn't matter. He calms, forgets the question, comes to believe in this friendship as a strange kind of brotherhood, and he shoulders the responsibility he feels goes with such a fraternity, though he expects slightly more of them than he does his own brother, because they've yet to let him down, they're more than human in a way he'll never fully understand.
And they prove that in a way that shatters his confidence and leaves him faced with the question again, this time made aware it was given a lie before. So he shoves it away, doesn't even put it back into the cellar with another false answer. If they aren't family to him, they don't matter. He doesn't have to answer the question that says the friendship was more than anything he'd had before – the profound bond was something he could disregard altogether, because it had betrayed him.
He runs from the question, even when it returns, because he can't bear to try and label the familiarity, can't allow himself to forgive, because then he would have to admit to what he knew it had been all along but refused to recognize. Nothing else could have opened the door so easily and repeatedly – except love.